EDMONTON - In a quest similar to the Oilers' annual pursuit
of hockey free agents, the University of Alberta regularly scours
the world for the best in academic talent.

EDMONTON - In a quest similar to the Oilers' annual pursuit of hockey free agents, the University of Alberta regularly scours the world for the best in academic talent.

Last year, the school landed a big name in Richard McCreery, a leading electrochemist from the United States.

How was McCreery persuaded to pack up his lab after 32 years at Ohio State University? An exorbitant salary? Ten weeks' vacation? A no-trade clause? As it turns out, the catalyst for McCreery's decision came from a source completely beyond the U of A's control: U.S. President George W. Bush.

"The last (presidential) election in 2004, both my wife and I were pretty disgusted with the outcome," McCreery recalls. "After that, I started to make inquiries about universities in Canada. I figured if I was in a different country, I wouldn't have to listen to 'W' so much."

U of A administrators can only hope there are more McCreerys out there, because over the next few years, the school has a lot of shopping to do in the academic marketplace.

Five hundred new professors are expected to be hired by 2010 in one of the biggest recruiting drives in the university's history.

Most of these new positions will be for junior academics, younger and less experienced than McCreery.

Yet even at this level, the U of A is demanding scholars at the very top of their peer groups in an effort to build its reputation around the world.

The idea is to bring in people who will regularly produce eye-catching research and help students do the same.

"We're not willing to settle for very good," says Art Quinney, the university's acting provost. "In order to go where we want to go, very good won't do it."

How does the U of A plan to woo so much top-drawer talent to Edmonton? The answer, Quinney says, has little to do with fat contracts. Nor does the university employ some secretly brilliant recruiting strategy.

Like other schools, the U of A finds much of its new faculty by placing ads in academic journals and websites.

Other times, the university will go after specific people with a more aggressive approach, often using its own professors to sell their department to the intended scholar.

In some of these cases, funding organizations such as the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research and the Alberta Ingenuity Fund get involved in the process.

Quinney, however, believes the best strategy of all is word-of-mouth advertising. If the university continues to build its reputation through quality programs, a strong academic staff and superior funding and facilities, the rest takes care of itself, he says.

"We depend on our overall reputation, and right now we are seen as a university on the move," he says. "That gets around. So while these academics may not know a lot about Edmonton, they will know about the University of Alberta and the research that is being done here."

McCreery says that while his contempt for Bush provided the initial impulse to move, he would not have left Ohio State without having somewhere better to go.

The U of A was one of the first Canadian schools to come to mind, because its chemistry department was well respected and he knew some of its researchers.

Later, on a visit to campus, he was sold when the Alberta government announced it was contributing $285 million to build the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science.

Such an investment indicated the government had the right priorities, as opposed to many U.S. states where science budgets were getting squeezed, he says.

The National Institute for Nanotechnology was also set to open, offering colleagues and facilities helpful to McCreery's work, which involves looking at the behaviour of molecules in micro-electronic circuits.

Of particular importance, he said, was the institute's "clean room," which has less than 1,000 particles of dust per cubic metre, compared with the 100,000 particles per cubic metre found in a typical room.

"When you are working with devices smaller than a dust particle, you can't afford to have these 'boulders' on your sample," McCreery says.

Money was essential as well. Not so much his personal salary, which changed little from the paycheque he earned in Ohio, but rather the dollars needed to pursue his research.

To pay for specialized lab equipment, research assistants and other expenses, funding agencies came through with grants worth about $4.5 million over five years.

"I needed to be sure that I could build a better operation here than the one I left behind. Otherwise, why move?" McCreery says.

"It wasn't like I looked at a map of the world and said, 'Hey, I want to go to the U of A.' It happened to be the right combination of facilities and people that made it attractive."

Quinney says further recruiting success is crucial for the U of A to achieve its lofty ambitions.

For one thing, the current ratio of undergraduate students to academic staff, about 23 to 1, must be reduced to about 15 to 1. Other top schools maintain this type of balance to ensure students have ample opportunity to interact with their professors, he says.

But even more important is that additional faculty will allow the U of A to bring in more graduate students.

"Right now we are at a ceiling for grad students because each professor can work with only a certain number," Quinney says.

"That's a critical issue for us and for the province, because grad students are the group we need to take those leading positions in our industries and institutions."

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